Curl Up & Dye in Midtown closing to make way for new pop-up retail space

Curl Up & Dye in Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood has closed shop after nearly seven years to make way for a year-round, pop-up retail space.

Business had been great for the nontoxic beauty and barber shop, but owner Jennifer Willemsen said the time was right to shift to a new concept.

She’d been looking into doing something different with the leased space for years.

“But I never felt OK to do it, because I felt like the neighborhood really needed for Curl Up to sustain,” given the number of small businesses that would come and go fairly quickly, she said.

Seven months pregnant with her first child, Willemsen said she is definitely ready for a change, and the loss of Curl Up isn’t going to break Midtown at this point, given the demand for commercial space there.

Converting the space to JoyRide: Pop Up Rendezvous was an easy way for her to continue to help offer something relevant in the community while also enabling her to hold onto the space in case she wants to do something different there in the future, she said.

Her first retail pop-up tenant, Z Ballerini, is moving into the 1,300-square-foot space at 4215 Cass Ave. for the holiday shopping season.

Z Ballerini’s owner, Mike Ballerini, a graduate of the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, makes men’s travel and everyday bags from high-end materials such as leather and wool, Willemsen said.

The small business is already in the store, repainting and hanging signage in advance of its opening by month’s end, she said.

Willemsen said she hasn’t set the per-square-foot price, yet, and declined to say what Z Ballerini is paying for its short-term sublease.

After the holidays, she plans to change the look of the space and set it up to accommodate up to eight vendors at a time, with roughly a 10-foot-wide space for each.

She’ll target short-term subleases of one to three months with multiple small businesses, rather than long-term tenants.

Willemsen is also open to working with the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., Ponyride and similar types of business development organizations that might want to rent it for a single startup for a short period.

“I think it’s the best for the community to get exposure to as much different retail as possible," she said. "There isn’t going to be much opportunity for that because of the lack of commercial retail space at this point.”

Having the opportunity to do a popup in Midtown is also good for the small businesses, she said.

They get to experience good exposure in a good location, at manageable costs, Willemsen said.

"And they get a taste of brick-and-mortar costs ... before they go and open a storefront.”